Its deleting all DLC by the looks off it! https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/game-just-uninstalled-itself.76418/
This is like a nuklear blast to the TS Community. Thankfully, I read about this in time and started my Laptop in flight mode.... This game is surviving on Mods and the Freeware Community at this point. DTG ist not even making DLC at the moment. People have built massive collections...also including loads of stuff from outside of Steam, that are not available for download anymore. People are working on routes, repaints, trains and assets. Not everyone makes back ups every two days....a lot of creative work might have been destroyed for good today. Anyone who could "escape the blast" will surely be treated with a nice "file verification" by Steam, whenever they dare to go online again. So get your back ups ready boys! What happened is a new low for DTG as a company and utterly unacceptable. There needs to be more than a "sorry" on the forums this time. Free DLC, Vouchers? I don´t know...
IMPORTANT GOOD NEWS The change has been rolled back. On my end it is currently reinstalling, it may take a while, depending on how much stuff you have and how Steam decides to throttle you. DTG Jamie might also show up soon. The only issue is that some modded files will be rolled back for those who have suffered the uninstall. (E.g. bugfixes)
Excellent to see the fix is already here but this really should not have happened in the 1st place, DTG your QA is non existant!
Are you kidding me? Anyone working on custom routes and scenarios might have had weeks or months of work destroyed in a few seconds. Also all the stuff, that has disappeared from internet and can´t be downloaded anymore. Everything gone, if you did not have a back up. I read about this in time and got my laptop in flight mode on startup. Otherwise 2 weeks of routebuilding would have gone "bye, bye".
What should the update actually bring? (except de-installing stuff). Good boy. I´m lukcy I´ve seen this news and have deactivated some time ago the automatic updates via steam. Would be better if updates could be fully deactivated and not only : when starting game.
This is why you need backup. Thankfully it's fixed quickly though, so not a massive issue. But.. yeah.
I sympathize with your scare! The point is, the current event is ultimately the equivalent of a random file verification. You only need to fix (reinstall) 3rd party things. (Frankly, if DTG gets there, the 3rd party mess should be fixed. AP weather is a mod so there is that, but Assets and Content should just stay.) If you work on your custom route, it should still be in place. Steam leaves untracked files be, all my Blueprints.pak or CurrentSave files are in place. (My reinstall is complete.) Heck, even my custom tmScaleRailTraffic package is apparently in place. Also, ideally, if you just came home with your PC offline during the day, you may not even see the update. Can't confirm that after-the-fact. Whenever this kind of thing happens, it's often the best to not panic and wait. Maybe create a backup copy mid-fact. Some people resorted to try a clean install, for pure Steam players it's fine but that can be a mess.
Do you have time to copy your massive Railworks folder over to another drive every other day? Takes me like 10 hours...even going from SSD to SSD. It is a massive issue for the reasons I stated. We will be hearing in time about canceled projects (maybe even payware ones), because there was no back up. Even if you only have not backed up for a couple of weeks, it can be very hard to find the motivation to redo a bunch of stuff, that was finished.
I'm confused. I have an update from Steam pending. Should I install it or not? It only triggered about 30 minutes ago.
My general advice for route builders, for what it is worth, is to store a backup of your route in a folder outside of the Steam/Railworks folder hierarchy after each editing session......and make "offline" your default status when you start Steam, this protects both your route and TSC files from this kind of issue ( and protects you should you accidentally trash something in your route ), you can then go online to Steam tp update when you know that it is safe to do so. You can turn off autotatic updates on a game-by-game basis, but I'm not 100% sure how solid that it......I always play safe as I have no need to routinely be online on Steam. Andy
You can set it up with a simple script, using robocopy source target /mir It only updates files that have changed. So the first time it's slow, then it's fine. I use it to mirror my music collection. Be aware that automating such a backup can misfire in several ways. If it's a pure backup, it might happen during a moment it shouldn't. Such as, 6pm today It it's used for synchronisation, you might accidentally run it the wrong direction. I deleted a set of screenshots taking me 3-4 hours this way about a year ago. Not even sure why but I ended up running pull instead of push.
It still managed to wipe a bunch of stuff before I could squash it. I've been waiting for a good excuse to do a complete uninstall, this is it. Peace out to your dead game, and no, discounts for your half baked lionel train experience won't make me stay.
You don't need to do that. You use incremental backups, so you only back up what's new. So once you update something, you test it to check all is well, then you run a back up. You don't need to keep backing up the entire Railworks folder, just the changes made to it. So many people just don't understand backups. It's no wonder so few actually do it.
It should be, got on my computer for the first time since I played before the update and my game didn't update and even if it does it still shouldn't do anything catastrophic as Jamie said the game is safe to play now but still have a backup ready just in case.
Don’t know if it helps anyone, but the update still showed for me yesterday evening and the play button said ‘Update’, I exited Steam and when I went back in (in online mode), the Steam client updated and the update disappeared. Not sure if that was just in my case but might be worth a try if you didn’t already. I had a backup, so it wouldn’t have been a total disaster, but I still didn’t want to use it unless I had to.
Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence
I paused the update that had started yesterday. Today it is trying to continue the update with a 128Gb download. Do I let it continue, in the hope that the download is a corrected version, or should I copy the current downloaded files across to another drive and delete the files in the downloading 24010 folder, to get the latest version to download?
I have luckily TS-Updates on hold (updating only when starting game) and had´nt started the game yesterday. At the time the bad update was rolled back I had still an update in steam listed. I went offline, restarted steam, back online, it still shows on an update. So what now, how works Steam. If starting this updated - Steam knows that there is a rolled back one? I want to get sure theres nothing hiding something bad in the pipeline. After first core-updates and hearing about this one has wiped away my trust. DTG What was the initial propose for an update? I found nowwhere an info. Last official update announcement in the forum was from 15th Nov, and I´m sure I got them a day before this. Or was no update planned, and something wrent wrong and the bad thing appeared? And because of all those stuff I don´t like this steam options that forces updates in any case. Only option to prevent updates even when starting a game is offline mode, and in that many games cannot be (properly) played. TSW4 for example as I noticed yesterday, MSFS, ....) . Furtherwise it should be implemented by steam, game developers or whoever, that before deinstalling/deleting ANY content the user should be asked first. I mean: if deleting files in your explorer, normally you get warned; or in other cases you get warned before it takes action. Those functions has a sense why they are there. So it should here the case too, even when a user is demarking an DLC. (Although one might also ask oneself, could something like this have prevented what happened yesterday). Especially TSClassic where lots of DLCs existing, a lots of mods, a lots of 3rd party stuff. Thats not like an American Truck Simulator with relatively small amount of mods. That is installed fast. Not for TS-users with hundreds of GB. Backups are important, but some 3rd party needs nevertheless to be reinstalled.
While they didn't respond, a look at SteamDB shows something that's quite likely a file encoding error. You can see here * https://steamdb.info/app/24010/history/ that all depots with size have been removed and the same depots have been added with an empty gid (whatever that is). They did, pretty much right after, updated this depot: They also updated two recently created products today which is likely encrypted and secretive, looks like a new route and a loco.
I went back online today and cleared update cache but an update has still happened (348kb?). I noticed that the AP enhancement packs for Sky & Weather, Track and Cloud Enhancement packs all needed reinstalling and the 390 Sound Pack too. My RW folder doesn't seem to have been reduced in size and my stock and routes seem to be present but no idea if any further damage has or will be done
Curious as well. I postponed the initial game killer update yesterday before it could install. Dtg have stated they've corrected it but I'm afraid if i continue updates it'll still jack my files up AND THEN run the "fix" update- which I'd rather not have do
